Peggy

Peggy is a college friend of Marianne who moves easily through a social world organized around parties, flirtation, and conspicuous confidence. She can be funny and intimate, but also cruelly teasing: her friendship with Marianne offers attention and belonging while repeatedly making Marianne its target. When Marianne’s relationship with Jamie ends and her standing among their friends deteriorates, Peggy insists that she is Marianne’s best friend yet refuses to take her side. Their conflict reveals the conditional nature of the group’s solidarity and helps Marianne recognize how much she had mistaken social approval for genuine friendship.

Identity and Social Presence

Peggy studies History and Politics with Marianne and Joanna. At a party, she is described in a battered leather jacket and striped linen trousers, her loose hair repeatedly tossed aside as she talks with Joanna and Marianne. Her manner is theatrical and self-assured: she can make a cutting remark, then find the situation funny rather than take offence when someone challenges her. Marianne’s account contrasts Peggy’s formidable, sexually charged charisma with Joanna’s seriousness and comic intelligence, presenting Peggy as someone whose power in a group depends less on careful argument than on force of personality.

Peggy’s ambitions differ from Joanna’s stated interest in journalism. She does not appear to want conventional work, and instead dates somewhat older, affluent men who buy her handbags and expensive drugs. Joanna once asks whether Peggy imagines a future in which she is the older partner in a similar arrangement; Peggy laughs and says she expects to marry a Russian oligarch. The exchange sketches a social confidence grounded in access to money and male attention, while also showing Peggy’s tendency to meet criticism with performance rather than defensiveness. Marianne, who is still uncertain what she will do after college, considers Peggy’s apparent freedom alongside her own sense that many futures remain open to her.

Friendship with Marianne

Peggy’s bond with Marianne is close in practical, everyday terms. She spends time at Marianne’s apartment, sleeps there when Jamie is away, eats breakfast in Marianne’s bed, and keeps her company while Marianne showers. Peggy’s attention makes Marianne feel chosen as a special friend, even when it takes up much of her free time. That private closeness, however, does not prevent Peggy from making fun of Marianne in front of their wider circle. Marianne tries to laugh along for the others’ sake; when the group has left, Peggy seeks reassurance that Marianne is not angry, and Marianne answers defensively that she is not. The same pattern is expected to recur again within hours, suggesting that reconciliation has become a familiar ritual rather than a resolution.

At parties Peggy also turns Marianne’s academic performance into material for public teasing. After the scholarship examinations, she calls Marianne the smartest person in the world but says she is a “bottler,” while Marianne tries to keep the exchange light. Peggy’s jokes sit uneasily beside the fact that Marianne is highly capable and that the examinations went adequately. Because Marianne’s friends sometimes respond to her attempts at humour with laughter that seems sympathetic or pitying, Peggy’s teasing does not occur in a neutral atmosphere: it helps define Marianne’s place in the group as someone whose embarrassment can become entertainment.

Their friendship also overlaps with Peggy’s encouragement of risk. At a pre-Christmas party, Peggy offers Marianne cocaine in a friend’s bathroom; Marianne takes most of it, later feeling both amused at having done so and guilty. Marianne does not tell Joanna, knowing that Joanna would disapprove—and recognizing that she herself disapproves too. The episode distinguishes Peggy’s influence from Joanna’s: Peggy can make transgression feel like part of social ease, while Joanna’s disapproval would carry enough weight to change Marianne’s decision.

Class, Intimacy, and Social Performance

During a conversation about male friends’ clothes, Peggy challenges Joanna’s point that Connell comes from a working-class background, asking whether that means she cannot criticize his dress sense. Marianne intervenes to say that this is not what Joanna meant. Peggy then insists that the group is very nice to Connell. Marianne cannot meet either friend’s eyes and wants to ask who Peggy means by “we”; instead, she takes the bottle from Peggy and drinks. The small exchange exposes an unspoken hierarchy within the group: Peggy presents its welcome as generous, while Marianne senses that this account leaves out the unequal position Connell occupies and the limits of the group’s solidarity with him.

Peggy’s relationship to Marianne’s connections is not simply hostile. When Marianne is drunk at a party, Peggy is among the friends with whom she spends time, and the group’s intimacy forms part of the social life Marianne has acquired in college. But when Marianne’s popularity and relationship with Jamie become entangled, that intimacy proves precarious. Peggy can be a confidante and a source of attention in one setting, then an audience for jokes at Marianne’s expense in another. The contrast helps explain why Marianne values Peggy’s closeness even as she grows increasingly uncomfortable with its terms.

The Break with the College Circle

After Marianne breaks up with Jamie, the social circle begins to turn against her. She notices people looking away and conversations stopping when she enters; she loses the admired and envied position she had briefly occupied. Peggy is especially difficult for her because she repeatedly invokes the friendship itself as a claim: “I’m your best friend,” she says, in a voice Marianne finds increasingly strange. While Marianne is packing, Peggy says that people are talking about her and that people are upset about the whole situation. Marianne replies that she may not care about the same things Peggy cares about, but she does care about Peggy. Peggy says she does not want to take sides. Marianne points out the consequence plainly: Peggy does not want to take her side.

Peggy says she does not know whether Marianne understands how other people feel, and recommends that she consider seeing a therapist. Marianne does not understand why her lack of visible upset should be treated as evidence that she needs help, although the suggestion echoes accusations she has heard before. Peggy leaves her to pack. The confrontation makes the difference between closeness and allegiance explicit: Peggy expects the status of best friend to matter, but does not want that status to require a public choice in Marianne’s favour.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

In Sweden, Marianne says that Joanna is the only one who has kept in touch. Joanna has a girlfriend and says she no longer sees Peggy or the others, adding that they knew Joanna had been on Marianne’s side. Marianne apologizes for the possibility that her conflict with the group cost Joanna friendships; Joanna replies that she was never especially close to them and considers Peggy and Jamie poor people. Marianne agrees that she had been caught up in how much they seemed to like her. She now thinks of the group’s friendship as a kind of exchange of social standing, and recognizes that she had participated in it rather than standing above it.

Peggy therefore represents both the attraction and the cost of Marianne’s college belonging. Her attention can be affectionate and absorbing, but it is joined to teasing, social display, and an unwillingness to take sides when Marianne’s position becomes difficult. Marianne’s eventual estrangement from Peggy and the larger group does not leave her with a simple sense of moral superiority: through Joanna’s friendship and her own retrospective judgment, she sees how readily approval had drawn her into the very social competition she once believed herself to transcend.